Text 1965, 237 rader
Skriven 2006-08-05 19:36:00 av ROSS SAUER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av WAYNE CHIRNSIDE
Ärende: Maher and vaccinations
==============================
WAYNE CHIRNSIDE said to ROSS SAUER,

WC>-> DC> DC>I haven't seen his show since ABC pulled him off the air.

WC>-> DC> RS> Maher himself took a big hit on the credibility meter,
WC>-> DC> RS> when he said he was anti-vaccination, and made the false
WC>-> DC> RS> claim about vaccinations "never  stopping any disease."

WC>-> DC>Did he actually mean it?  

WC>-> DC>If so, he's an idiot.  

WC>-> Yup, he's bought the anti-vaccination bullshit hook, line, and
WC>-> sinker.

WC>Lost all credibility with me.
WC>hasn't he heard of Pastuer?
WC>Cow Pox?
WC>Smallpox?

Just look at this stupidity from him.

Bill Maher: Anti-vax wingnut 

Via Skeptico, I've learned of some more antivaccination stupidity 
issuing forth from self-proclaimed "skeptic" Bill Maher during his 
recent appearance on Larry King Live. Get a load of this:

MAHER: I'm not into western medicine. That to me is a complete scare 
tactic. It just shows you, you can...

KING: You mean you don't get a -- you don't get a flu shot?

MAHER: A flu shot is the worst thing you can do.

KING: Why?

MAHER: Because it's got -- it's got mercury.

KING: It prevents flu.

MAHER: It doesn't prevent. First of all, that's...

KING: I haven't had the flu in 25 years since I've been taking a flu 
shot.

MAHER: Well, I hate to tell you, Larry, but if you have a flu shot for 
more than five years in a row, there's ten times the likelihood that 
you'll get Alzheimer's disease. I would stop getting your...

KING: What did you say?

MAHER: That went better in rehearsal but it was still good. Absolutely, 
no the defense against disease is to have a strong immune system. A flu 
shot just compromises your immune system.

Ooh, boy. As Skeptico points out, that's a very specific claim, that 
getting flu shots more than five years in a row will increase your 
likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease by ten-fold. Personally, I'm 
unaware of any good (or even not so good) evidence that flu vaccines can 
increase your risk of Alzheimer's, but I'm always willing to try fill in 
the gaps in my knowledge. That's why I wonder what research, if any, 
supports Maher's assertion. Based on past experience, my guess is 
probably none, but, as Skeptico does, I will try to keep an open mind 
with regards to this topic and join Skeptico in e-mailing Bill to 
provide a specific source for his claim. My guess is that Maher probably 
read it on the altie kook site Whale.to or somewhere similar.

I thought about it a little more, and, because I was curious about where 
Maher might have found such a claim, I did a little investigating. 
First, I did a simple Google search using the terms "flu vaccine 
Alzheimer's." Guess what website came up first when I did my search? If 
you said the extremly flaky Whale.to website. . .you won! Here it is, 
right from the source:

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD (http://members.aol.com/nitrf), the 
world's leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our 
times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals), if an individual has 
had five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) 
his/her chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is ten times higher than 
if they had one, two or no shots. I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so 
and he said it was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu 
shot (and most childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum 
buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction. Is that why 
Alzheimer's is expected to quadruple? Notes: Recorded from Dr. 
Fudenberg's speech at the NVIC International Vaccine Conference, 
Arlington, VA September, 1997. Quoted with permission. Alzheimer's to 
quadruple statement is from John's Hopkins Newsletter Nov 1998.
Fudenberg?

Hmmm. That name sounded very familiar, so I did a little more digging. 
It turns out that Hugh Fudenberg was a collaborator and co-inventor with 
Andrew Wakefield, the scientist who published an absolutely horribly 
designed study in the Lancet in 1998 linking the MMR vaccine to autism, 
nearly all of whose authors later publicly retracted their authorship. 
This study, now thoroughly repudiated, caused a major scare in Britain 
and elsewhere regarding MMR, echoes of which persist even today, with 
anti-vaxers still citing Wakefield's Lancet study as "evidence" that MMR 
causes autism. (Particularly hilarious is when they attribute MMR 
"causing" autism to the mercury in thimerosal, mainly because MMR has 
never contained thimerosal.) Dr. Fudenberg also happens to have been 
involved in some very dubious "treatments" for autism that led to some 
problems with his medical license. In November 1995, the South Carolina 
Medical Board concluded that Fudenberg was "guilty of engaging in 
dishonorable, unethical, or unprofessional conduct," and he was fined 
$10,000 and ordered to surrender his license to prescribe controlled 
substances (narcotic drugs). His medical license was also placed on 
suspension. In March 1996, he was permitted to resume practice under 
terms of probation that did not permit him to prescribe any drugs. His 
medical license expired in January 2004; and in March 2004, he applied 
to have it reinstated. However, after a hearing in which the Board 
considered a neuropsychatric report issued in 2003, Fudenberg agreed to 
remain in a "retired" status and withdrew his application for 
reactivation of his license. Nowadays, Dr. Fudenberg runs a nonprofit 
"research" organization called Neuro Immunotherapeutics Research 
Foundation and still appears to be pushing dubious remedies for autism. 
He also charges $750 per hour for "review of past medical records," $750 
per hour for "determining what new tests need to be ordered; ordering of 
new tests; evaluation of new tests," and $750 per hour for "determining 
which therapy will work and which will not; discussing this with patient 
along with an in-depth study of past medical history to determine what 
makes a patient better or worse."

All of this sounds a lot like practicing medicine to me, which makes me 
wonder how someone with a lapsed medical license can get away with 
providing such "services" at such inflated prices. (Once again I have to 
wonder if I'm in the wrong business.) Of course, none of this means Dr. 
Fudenberg doesn't make a valid point, but he certainly hasn't supported 
it, as far as I can tell, and I looked. And just because he's published 
over 660 scientific papers in his career (not 800, as claimed, at least 
not according to PubMed, unless he published a lot before 1965) doesn't 
mean he isn't off the wall. After all, later in life Nobel Laureate 
Linus Pauling marred his legacy by lending his name to a lot of dubious 
vitamin C quackery. Besides, as far as I can tell, with one exception in 
1999, Dr. Fudenberg hasn't published any original research since the 
late 1980's. If you look at his PubMed publication list, you'll find 
that there is nothing after around 1989 other than review articles, 
speculative articles in Medical Hypotheses, plus a publication or two in 
dubious journals such as Biotherapy (which is no longer published). 
Looking at the list, a knowledgeable person can tell right about when 
Dr. Fudenberg started to descend into fringe medicine, sometime between 
1985-1989. And, try as I might, I couldn't find an article by Fudenberg 
to support his claim about the flu vaccine that Maher parrotted on Larry 
King Live.

In any case, the specific dubious autism treatment with which Dr. 
Fudenberg was involved is the use of something called "transfer factor" 
to make a combined measles vaccine and autism "cure." The method of 
making these so-called "transfer factors" is bizarre in the extreme and 
involves injecting mice with measles, extracting and processing white 
blood cells, injecting the result into pregnant goats, milking the goats 
after kid-birth and turning the product into capsules for autistic 
children. In a patent application (based in part on the infamous Lancet 
paper) obtained by Brian Deer, Wakefield represented a vaccine/therapy 
for "MMR-based" autism using transfer factor as potentially a "complete 
cure" for autism or for "alleviation of symptoms."

So what did Dr. Fudenberg base his claim about flu vaccines and autism 
on? Try as I might, I couldn't find any research that supports this 
assertion, at least not in PubMed. Any Google searches done inevitably 
brought up the same quote as above or variants of it, but no source 
pointed me to any actual research supporting Dr. Fudenberg's claim, even 
though he did seem to imply that he had done a study. Certainly there is 
nothing I could find in the peer-reviewed literature when I searched Dr. 
Fudenberg's name with the term "influenza." Indeed, the only paper I 
could find on PubMed on the subject of the flu vaccine and Alzheimer's 
disease concluded:

After adjustment for age, sex and education, past exposure to vaccines 
against diphtheria or tetanus, poliomyelitis and influenza was 
associated with lower risk for Alzheimer's disease (odds ratio [OR] 
0.41, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.27-0.62; OR 0.60, 95% CI 0.37-0.99; 
and OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.54-1.04 respectively) than no exposure to these 
vaccines...Past exposure to vaccines against diphtheria or tetanus, 
poliomyelitis and influenza may protect against subsequent development 
of Alzheimer's disease.
My goodness! It looks as though the flu vaccine might actually protect 
against Alzheimers! True, this is a retrospective study using a self-
questionnaire, which is a big problem. It definitely needs to be 
replicated with a more reliable study methodology than what was used and 
doing individual studies for each vaccine, rather than lumping four 
vaccines together in one study. However, I'd be willing to bet that, for 
all its shortcomings, this study is probably better evidence than Dr. 
Fudenberg can produce, and there is zero doubt in my mind that it's way 
better evidence than Bill Maher can produce, given that he undoubtedly 
got his bogus claim from either Whale.to, the infamous conspiracy-
mongering Rense.com site, Vaccination Liberation, or (of course) from 
altie supreme Dr. Mercola. Clearly, Bill Maher has difficulty evaluating 
the reliability and plausibility of evidence with regard to his beliefs 
in unnamed "toxins" rather than microorganisms causing disease, 
something he's shown before when he swallowed whole the myth of 
Pasteur's supposed deathbed "recantation" that he was wrong, and he sure 
seems pretty credulous about "evidence" coming from anti-vax websites.

But that's not all. Maher also parrotted the claim that it was better 
sanitation, not the polio vaccine, that eliminated polio. This is simply 
not true. Better sanitation certainly helps eliminate such diseases, but 
sanitation was pretty good in the 1950's, just before the polio vaccine 
was developed, and polio outbreaks were still fairly common and still 
quite feared. (People of a certain age will remember polio scares that 
occurred throughout this country before the polio vaccine was developed 
that would shut down public swimming pools and baths.) In actuality, 
better sanitation may have made people more susceptible to severe 
complications from polio, because sanitation made sure that most people 
were no longer routinely exposed to the virus as children. Also going 
against Maher's assertion is the observation that when polio vaccination 
rates fall, polio returns. It's the same with other infectious diseases, 
like pertussis.

I've written about Bill Maher's medical wingnuttery before. Given his 
antivaccination statements based on no evidence or on demonstrably 
incorrect evidence and his support of PETA, it's hard for me to conclude 
now that Bill Maher, who likes to represent himself as hard-nosed 
"skeptic" speaking truth to power, is anything other than a total 
wingnut, at least when it comes to medicine. As The Uncredible Hallq 
points out, Maher seems far more certain about his "ability to think" 
than is justified based on the evidence of his own words. Worse, he's 
not just peddling "concerns" about vaccination or "skepticism" over 
whether specific vaccinations have an insufficiently favorable risk-
benefit ratio to justify their use, an argument scientists and doctors 
sometimes make for certain vaccines. No, he's pushing a misguided belief 
that vaccines do more harm than good and a hostility towards vaccination 
in general that are both wrong-headed and just plain wrong. Vaccination 
represents arguably the single most effective public health intervention 
ever developed by "conventional" medicine. It has all but eliminated 
diseases that once ravaged huge swaths of this planet and will to 
protect billions of people from horrific diseases--that is, unless 
muddle-headed alties like Bill Maher have their way and persuade people 
that they don't need to vaccinate their children or themselves.

http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-maher-anti-vax-wingnut.html

From Archae's Roost, Sheboygan, WI

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